Tolerance cannot be measured in terms of degrees of intolerance. I am essentially opposed to burning books even when they incite others to violence. But freedom is either an absolute or it is conditioned on not inciting others to violence. Anything else is rationalized bigotry.

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Thursday, June 11, 2015

The Strong Horse and Arab Society

I have just completed reading a book by Lee
Smith titled “The Strong Horse. Power, Politics,
& the Clash of Arab Civilizations.”I recommend it to anyone interested in understanding the Near East and the greater issue of Arab politics. I have
quoted extensively from the book.Anything in quotation marks is either sourced from Lee Smith's book or a quotation from him. However, I have also added my
own thoughts on this subject below:

“When people see a strong horse and a weak
horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.”(Osama Bin Laden) What stands out from this
quote is the lack of any hint of compassion or mercy and if it encapsulates
Arab thinking then everything that comes after, is merely an excuse for Arab and
Muslim history.

Arab Nationalism is defined as “A political and
cultural doctrine holding that the Arabs by virtue of a shared language
constitute a separate and single people.” Arab nationalism is an “elevated
tribal covenant” with Islam as its engine and because of its theology of
pristine 7th Century religious perfection it is unable to confront
its ethical failures.An allegedly
homogeneous Arab identity is a relatively modern concept but behind this
super-tribal branding is the idea of a superior racial uniqueness and it drives
an Arab need to exercise power over its rivals, all of whom are identifiable by
their inferior faith, sex or race.

It is a Sunni Arab world view the glue of which
is Islam, created in Sunni Arab Saudi Arabia, spread by an aggressively
assertive and colonialist ideology and justified by religious authority. Of the
300 million Arabs, 70% are Sunni.The
Sunni reliance on violence is the central motif in a pattern that existed
before Islam and it informs the regions social and political relations. “bin
Ladenism is not drawn from the extremist fringe but represents the political
and social norm.”

The “Pact of Omar” established the laws and
regulations by which Jews and Christians were awarded both protection and
inferior status (the pact defined the relationship with all infidels).
It defines the racial aspect of Arab superiority over all others at the same
time as codifying the hierarchical position of Islam against all others.

For the Arab, God “is not the agent of history
but a narrative detail, the protagonist of one story that manages to motivate
groups of men to kill and die.”If the
pact of Omar was intended to regulate the relationship with conquered nations
and their people, it also created an apartheid faith that is religiously unable
to accept the basic humanity of the other.It condemns the Muslim faithful to eternal jihad.

Arab nationalism has sought to erase Arab
crimes against humanity by portraying a heroic legendary vision of a homogeneous
Arab identity and by blaming every non-Arab for its failures.Nazism used a motto that Germany had
been “stabbed in the back.” It did so, to soothe inflated German egos and to focus
the energies of the people against a mythical enemy. It exploited the
prejudices of the people to unite them behind a common enemy. Similarly, Arab nationalism uses betrayal (‘foreign’
interference) to explain Arab weakness. It exploits the failure to encourage internal
debate to paper over massive inequality and to explain the disjuncture between
a self-image of global power and the reality of Arab fragmentation and discord.

Arab politics is defined by a passion that is
irrational, “maximalist and millenarian.” It means that there is room only for short
term, tactical back-room compromises and therefore there is little reason for public
debate.Ideas like legitimacy and
authenticity have significance only between those that rule because “Arab
politics is an affair between armed elites, the regimes and their insurgent
rivals, who will kill and die for their cause.”

If strong tactics are not used to discourage violence then violence wins
(the strong horse). It is a testosterone charged contest that the women of
society are committed to upholding even as it disadvantages them.If fear of violence is the only proven
guarantee of fidelity and protection from rivals then the structure of society
is determined by the hierarchical dominance of the strongest.

The perceived logic in the West is that if an
organization or a person has a wide enough base of support they can not
possibly be on the extremist fringe. It supplies the superficial reasoning behind
the support that so many people on the parliamentary Left, those who at least
in theory support democracy, use to back Hamas in Gaza.This
is the unreasoned argument made by Western supporters of Hezbollah in Lebanon.
In the worst case scenario, the thinking holds that a choice between fascism and
democracy is unimportant because all ideological paths eventually moderate by convergence.
The specious logic (not borne out by historical precedent) is that by its
nature, power is a leveler, a force for moderation.The narrative dished out to the doubters is
that the business of governance leaves little time for extremism; that funding
a revolution forces the radical to focus on administration; and that greed seeks
out popular approval in order to maintain its hegemony. The sophistry in the theory is in the paucity
and the pain of historical precedent.The
case of Egypt and the
election of the Muslim Brotherhood disproved that theory in less than a year as
Egypt
tottered on the brink of bankruptcy. The Muslim Brotherhood motto in response
to Western calls for democracy has always been that “the Quran is our constitution.”

It does
not automatically follow that support for the electoral process equates with support
for democracy or allegiance to concepts of either human rights or equality. A
propensity towards the use of violence or risk taking is not the behavior of
those who believe in the intrinsic nature of democracy.

“Democracy is not an application, but the
manifestation of a worldview that holds certain values dear, values that, since
they were fought and sacrificed for, cannot be easily transferred from one
culture to another.”

The goals of Arab Society should be the same as
the idealised benchmark we all share in the Western World: energy stability, food
security, employment, stable health care and crucially, the social contract that
theoretically undertakes to keep us safe. Given the current state of Arab
society few Arab nations can deliver that promise to their
people.Democratisation of the Middle
East and beyond must be an overarching security strategy for both the USA and Europe
because without it, the instability that afflicts the Arab world will
inevitably spread past its borders, infecting any society with which it comes
into contact.

Perhaps the only lever we in the West can
effectively utilise is to offer the Arab world a path forward based on self-interest
rather than despair.But if that is to
happen we will need to re-awaken in our own societies a robust assertiveness
about what defines us and what makes us worth emulating, and we will need to exclude
those people who actively work against our vision.